In the field of psychotherapy there is a subtle, often unconscious, devaluation of rural knowledge, conventions, and subjectivity, and a belief that urban reality is definitive. Through metaphors from geography and cartography and via psychoanalytic theory on privilege, I formulate urbanity as a seldom-addressed privilege and consider implications of the misrepresentation or absence of the rural world on the "map" of psychotherapy. I countermap urban biases on power, space, and time and explore consequences of frame, self-disclosure, ethics, and interpretations as I investigate urban valuing of specialized expertise over wisdom, urban disconnection from weather and distance, urban colonizing behavior, the dumping of incompetent professionals into rural areas, and the urban sense of entitlement to anonymity.

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In this article, Dr. Drescher presents a case of a sexual-minority patient treated by a sexual-minority therapist. The discussant, clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst Malin Fors, uses the case to reflect on the benefits and limits of the new section of the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual, 2nd Edition, called "Nonpathological Conditions That Could Need Clinical Attention" (minority stress).

Power issues in psychotherapy are often addressed from the perspective of intersectional and societal power, enacted or embodied in the therapy relationship. Following the thinking of Young-Bruehl, who argued for acknowledging the heterogeneity of oppression, this article posits a heterogeneity of power themes in psychotherapy. Four areas of power are highlighted: Professional power, transferential power, socio-political power, and bureaucratic power. All these kinds of power are explored through the case of "Sonja," with the overall aim of illuminating power issues in psychotherapy and illustrating how they may operate simultaneously and synergistically.

In this paper I offer the term “potato ethics” to describe a particular professional rural health sensibility. I contrast this attitude with the sensibility behind urban professional ethics, which often focus on the narrow doctor–patient treatment relationship. The phrase appropriates a Swedish metaphor, the image of the potato as a humble side dish: plain, useful, versatile, and compatible with any main course. Potato ethics involves making oneself useful, being pragmatic, choosing to be like an invisible elf who prevents discontinuity rather than a more visible observer of formal rules and assigned tasks. It also includes actively taking part in everyday disaster-prevention and fully recognizing the rural context as a vulnerable space. This intersectional argument, which emphasizes the ongoing, holistic responsibility of those involved in rural communities, draws on work from the domains of care ethics, relational ethics, pragmatic psychology, feminist ethics of embodiment, social location theory, and reflections on geographical narcissism.